Tag: PowerCLI

Hello again, everyone! For my fifth post for this year’s #BlogtoberTech challenge, I decided to share a script I recently wrote that seeks out virtual machines in a vSphere environment based on a specific virtual hardware version. This sort of ties in with the BIOS and UEFI scripts I wrote earlier in the year to seek out VMs that may still be open to the Spectre/Meltdown vulnerabilities (virtual hardware version 8 or older). Or perhaps someone wants to seek out VMs that may be good candidates to enable Secure Boot (virtual hardware 13 or newer with EFI boot firmware configured).

In the initial version of this script, I ask the user to pick the vCenter to connect to, the datacenter object to scan, and then the virtual hardware version to seek out. If VMs of virtual hardware n are found, the user has the option of exporting the results to a CSV file. Otherwise, a dialog box will appear (via Out-GridView) that shows the results of the can. If, however, no VMs with a specified virtual hardware version are found, it will simply let the user know that “No VMs with virtual hardware n were found.”

Hey everyone! I wanted to spread the word about my upcoming presentation at the Central PA VMUG on Thursday, November 1st in State College! Last year, I spoke at the Pittsburgh VMUG on the topic of PowerCLI and my journey into scripting. This year, I plan on revisiting that presentation with several new updates and maybe even do live demo (assuming I can get my home lab completely set up and configured in time)! Plus, I’m looking forward to catching up with the Central PA VMUG crew as well as meeting many others in the #vCommunity!

For those who may not know, October 2017 was my first time ever presenting at a local VMUG meeting. In fact, I wasn’t really engaged in the VMware Community all that much until about April 2017, when I started my blog and began using Twitter a lot more. Sure, I’ve been using VMware’s products and services since about 2010, but the only real ‘engagement’ I’ve done in the community was attend the occasional VMUG or UserCon.

I recently had a request come through to see if there was a way to quickly find any/all virtual machines with Independent Disks attached. In this particular scenario, I’ll be looking for these types of VMs within a specific datacenter object. However, this script could easily be changed to scan an entire vCenter object, if needed. This script will look for VMs with both independent persistent as well as independent non-persistent disks.

Like some of my other scripts, this one also utilizes the try/catch when first connecting to a vCenter Server. For instance, if you attempt to connect to a vCenter and enter the wrong credentials or wrong server name/IP, it will stop the script and state that it “Could not connect to the vCenter Server <name>. In addition, I also have some logic built in to track the progress of the scan, as well as the option to export the results to CSV if preferred.

A few months ago, I wrote two blog posts about how to find all UEFI- or BIOS-enabled virtual machines at the data center level within a vCenter Server. But what if you just want to quickly look up the boot firmware setting of a specific VM or even just a few of them?

I wrote this script as a way to quickly look up a small number of VMs to see if they might be good candidates for enabling Secure Boot or not. If you recall from those two posts, in order to enable Secure Boot, a VM needs to have virtual hardware version 13 or higher (meaning vSphere 6.5 or higher), and the VM boot firmware needs to be set to EFI.

This script is an idea that spun off of my previous post, PowerCLI: Find UEFI-Enabled VMs. If you’re preparing to enable Secure Boot in a VMware environment, it may be helpful to identify the VMs that cannot be upgraded. As you might recall, enabling secure boot requires the following:

With all the news regarding the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities over the past several months, there’s been a greater focus to get VMware virtual machines to virtual hardware version 9 or higher, as noted by Andrea Mauro’s post regarding these vulnerabilities. In addition to that, several companies and organizations may be looking to enable Secure Boot, a feature first introduced with vSphere 6.5. However, in order to enable secure boot, the virtual machine needs to be configured with both EFI boot firmware AND be on virtual hardware version 13 or higher.

For the fifth and final portion of my Git Integration with VS Code blog series, this post focuses on Synchronizing Content with GitHub. Previously in Part 4, we configured Visual Studio Code to establish a connection and download content from GitHub. In this post, I wanted to focus on staging, committing, and pushing content back up to GitHub. Continue reading “Git Integration with VS Code: Part 5 – Syncing with GitHub”

Now that PowerShell has been upgraded, and we installed both Git and VS Code, let’s go ahead and configure our environment for synchronization with GitHub. For me, this part was really the meat and potatoes of getting VS Code to integrate with Git and GitHub.

In case you missed it, this blog post picks up where Part 1 – Upgrading PowerShell left off. In continuing on with the Git Integration with VS Code blog series, I now present Part 2 – Installing PowerCLI and Git!